Blair Earns Redemption at
Buckmasters Life Hunt
By DAVID RAINER
Skylar Blair needed redemption at the 16th
annual Buckmasters Life Hunt Classic at Sedgefield Plantation in
Dallas County last week.
He’d missed a nice 8-point the afternoon before.
He knew he couldn’t afford another miss with kangaroo court set for
the final day of the three-day event, which brings about a dozen
disabled hunters from across the nation to the prime hunting land
owned by the Hinton family in west central Alabama.
Blair, like his dad (David), suffers from
muscular dystrophy. The Blairs have a form of the disorder called
Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, a neurological disorder that
causes damage to the peripheral nerves that carry signals from the
brain and spinal cord to muscles, as well as relay sensations (i.e.
pain and touch) to the brain and spinal cord from the rest of the
body.
 “It
makes life a little harder, but you learn to live with it,” said the
17-year-old Skylar, whose family hails from Huntsville.
But he’s not blaming his disease on his miss on
the opening day of the hunt. “I don’t know what happened,” Skylar
said. “I guess I got in a hurry (aka buck fever).”
On the second morning, it was cold and blustery
and Skylar and his guide, Clayton Lynn, had only seen does and
yearlings.
“We were actually climbing down out of the
stand,” said Skylar, who was nominated for the hunt by the Alabama
Conservation Enforcement Officers Association. “We had been rattling
and we were climbing down. We looked up and there were two bucks
walking right at us. They were getting closer and closer.
Skylar climbed back into the stand got his rifle
reloaded.
“Finally we stopped him at about 40 yards,” he
said. “I don’t remember how Clayton stopped him. I was focused on
the shot. I wasn’t going to miss again.”
After the shot, the buck ran over a hill about 50
yards away and disappeared. Fortunately, the buck had gone down just
out of sight.
“When we got down and went to him I didn’t
realize how big he was,” Skylar said. “I walked over to him and
said, ‘Wow, that’s a really good deer.’ It’s going to make a nice
mount. This was my first rack buck.”
The elder Blair said he is not an outdoorsman and
can’t take any credit for his son’s love of hunting.
“But I do think it was genetic,” David said.
“When he was young and had the opportunity to watch cartoons, he
never would. He was always watching The Outdoor Channel and the
outdoors shows on ESPN and Buckmasters. It’s always been in his
blood, and I don’t know where it came from. He’s lucky that we have
a lot of family members who like to hunt, so he goes with them.”
Skylar added: “I hunt all the time. I hunt mainly
deer, but I duck hunt sometimes and I go squirrel hunting some.
Hunting is a big part of my life.”
Making dreams – like Skylar’s – come true at this
hunt is the main goal for Jackie Bushman, who founded Buckmasters in
his hometown of Montgomery in 1986.
“We’ve been doing this 16 years and I can’t
believe it’s been that long since David Sullivan called me about
doing a show on the old TNN (The Nashville Network),” said Bushman.
“I told David I needed help to get through that first hunt. After
that episode aired, our phone lines just lit up, and we basically
became a network for disabled hunters, which we’re real proud of.
Now, I think we’ve done between 5,000 and 6,000 disabled hunts.
“We’re in a recession, but when you come down
here nobody is having a bad day. To have the opportunity to help
these kids and adults get their first deer or first nice buck, it’s
priceless.”
Bushman stays busy videoing episodes of
Buckmasters and the Jackie Bushman Show, but he’s never too busy for
the Life Hunt Classic.
“I say this every year – we do 39 original shows
each year, and if the networks said I could only do one show, this
would be it,” he said. “It means more to me personally because of
all the kids, parents, the Hintons and the guides who work so hard
to make this happen. To see the smiles on these kids’ and adults’
faces, it makes it all worth it. For some of them, it’s their first
deer. It’s an honor for us to do this.
“We’ve seen a lot of different disabilities in
the 16 years, but we’ve never seen one that we couldn’t find
adaptive equipment to make the hunt happen. It’s a neat three days,
that’s all I can say.”
Soon after that first disabled hunt, the
aforementioned David Sullivan became the director of Disabled Hunter
Services for Buckmasters American Deer Foundation, the non-profit
wing of Buckmasters.
“Our goal is to touch people’s lives and give
them hope,” Sullivan said. “We hope that some will take home a
trophy deer. But I’ll tell you some of the best hunts we’ve had,
people have gone home without a deer but just had a wonderful time.
Sullivan said he and his staff scrutinize
applications and end up with about 50-60 viable applicants for the
Classic. The ones who aren’t chosen for the Classic are included on
other hunts.
“The thing that amazes me is that all the
volunteers seem to get more out of the hunt than the hunters do,” he
said. “And we’ve been able to accommodate a variety of disabilities
from people who were completely blind to quadriplegics who couldn’t
move anything from the neck down to one young man who didn’t have
any limbs, and he was able to take a deer.
“It’s a team effort. The Hintons do a wonderful
job. They get their friends and family to help out. We’ve got our
blind-building down to a science, and we pretty well know where to
put the blinds. The only things we can’t control are the deer and
the weather, and the Good Lord always takes care of that for us.”
The Alabama Department of Conservation and
Natural Resources also offers opportunities for disabled individuals
who enjoy hunting, shooting and fishing.
The Alabama Hunting and Fishing Trail for People
with Physical Disabilities features 17 areas available for hunting
across the state, as well as 11 shooting sites and 20 fishing
venues.
Visit
http://www.outdooralabama.com/hunting/physically-disabled
for more information.
PHOTO: Skylar Blair, 17, of Huntsville and Buckmasters founder
Jackie Bushman show off the nice eight-point Blair bagged during the
Buckmasters Life Hunt Classic recently at Sedgefield Plantation in
Dallas County.
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